by Rod Redux
Tanka had never believed in Il’Uuk and Pantanna, not until today, but today he was like the gods themselves. Today, he—Tanka-- was invincible, and he would find his brother Oy’he before this day was done, and he would crush his hated sibling’s skull with a stone. It was his fate to do so. He had dreamt it.
The hair on the back of Tanka’s neck rose up as he stood there grinning at the heavens.
I am being watched, Tanka thought.
2
He held his body very still and tried to slow the rushing of his heart, his senses alert to any threatening movements in the forest that surrounded him. He could feel the invisible entity that he had confronted the night before, a prickling in his flesh. Though he could not see it, he knew that it was very close, and that it had fixed its attention on him.
It did not matter what it was, or whether it had a name. It was a denizen of the flip side of the universe, a creature of the spirit realm. Not only could he feel its gaze upon him, Tanka could sense its hunger as well. It had a plan for him, of that he had no doubt, but the creature was ruled by its appetites. He could sense its reason warring with its desires, could feel the creature trying to decide which course of action it should take: self-indulgence or strategy.
Somewhere in the surrounding forest, the branch of a tree snapped. Leaves rustled.
Oily beads of sweat oozed from the pores of his face. He swallowed to moisten his throat and spoke aloud: “I will serve you.”
The racing of his heart made his words stutter, but the rustling quieted. It was the correct thing to say. Possibly the only words that could have preserved his life. He was certain the creature would have devoured him if he had said any other thing.
The great forest of the Onemara stirred. It was like a sigh of pleasure. All at once, every bush, every branch, every knotted root and leaf, shivered ever so subtly. The movement spread out from the clearing as if a brisk wind had descended from the heavens and coursed throughout the wilderness.
Gratitude weakened his knees, and then a feeling of elation—the realization that he had married his fate to something greater than himself, a being of inexplicable strength and mystery.
It was only pride which kept him from prostrating himself before the entity. A lesser man might have fallen to his knees and humbled himself, but not Tanka. He stood with his shoulders back and his head held high.
Smiling haughtily, he let his gaze drift across the rim of the clearing. Leaves spiraled silently to the ground all around as the stirring of the forest diminished. A strange thing caught his attention then. There, only a few strides away, the undergrowth had parted. A footpath wound its way through the wooded hills… one, he was certain, that had not been there moments before.
Yes, of course! he thought, remembering his dreams. Now I go to kill my brother.
3
Slaying Oy’he was so much like his dream that Tanka felt he had experienced it all before, yet repetition did little to dull the satisfaction of the act. He followed the path the forest had made for him, just as in his dream. He found the same stone with which to crush his brother’s skull. He even lost his footing in the exact same place while descending the bluff to his brother’s broken body-- grasping the same trailing vine to save himself from falling from his perch. If it had been any other task, he would certainly have become bored, but killing Oy’he was like returning in his mind to a favored sexual memory. He could have done it again and again and again before the murder lost its luster.
Oy’he looked up when Tanka’s shadow fell across the broken man’s face. His pupils were oddly mismatched, one large, the other one small. He blinked, trying to bring his vision into focus.
“Brother… Help me,” he grated.
There were too many joints in his brother’s legs, and blood had dried to a thick black crust on the left side of his face. The rough edge of a large stone had split open his brow, just above his left eye.
Tanka could see the dried blood splattered on the stone his head had struck when Oy’he fell, but he felt no pity for the man lying twisted at his feet. He felt nothing but anticipation, an excitement that was akin to taking a woman against her will.
A trembling hand rose to grasp the cusp of Tanka’s legging, just as it had in Tanka’s vision. “I am injured, brother,” Oy’he whispered, and his throat convulsed as he tried to swallow. “My body… is broken.”
Tanka stumbled a bit in the loose talus at the foot of the cliff, a few of the rocks clattering down the slope away from him. The weight of the stone in his hand reminded him of his task. He kicked his brother’s hand from his cuff and leaned closer, staring into Oy’he’s face, relishing this moment, memorizing it so that he could enjoy it in his mind whenever the impulse seized hold of him.
“Brother… please,” Oy’he hissed.
Tanka’s lips split into a joyous snarl. “At last,” he hissed, and then he heaved the stone above his head.
He held it there, the sun shining hot on his cheeks, his spirit singing, even his cock partaking in his victory, grown harder than it had in years. Harder even than the first time he’d thrust it into his brother’s arrogant woman.
With a grunt of pleasure, Tanka brought the stone down in an arc. It struck Oy’he in the center of his forehead, shattering the bone beneath and leaving a bloody depression an inch deep and about four inches in diameter.
Oy’he jerked and made a choking sound, blood squirting from both nostrils. His hands quivered and flopped and he voided both bowel and bladder simultaneously.
Panting, Tanka lifted the stone again and brought it down in the center of Oy’he’s face, pulping his nose and shattering all of his upper teeth.
He struck Oy’he with such force that his brother’s hot blood sprayed into his face, and he had to wipe his eyes with the sleeve of his jacket to clear his vision for the following blow.
He lifted the stone and brought it down, and Oy’he’s head ruptured with a wet slurping sound.
He lifted the stone and brought it down, and Oy’he’s mashed brains spurted out onto the rocky scree.
He struck him again… and then one last time. Finally, he was too tired to lift the stone anymore, and he cast it aside.
Tanka stumbled around, chest heaving, until he found another stone, one that was smaller and possessed of a good cutting edge. He returned to his brother and kneeled between the man’s shattered legs. Grinning, he jerked down his brother’s soiled breechclout. His pulled his sibling’s penis taut and sawed it off, then threw the hunk of bloody flesh onto the stones.
Let the birds have his manhood! he thought. He will cross into the spirit realm unmanned!
He sawed off Oy’he’s testicles and threw them after the man’s severed cock.
Let them feast on his balls, too! he thought with glee.
Exhausted, he collapsed onto his buttocks and tried to catch his wind.
He regarded his brother’s mangled body as he rested. He had no pity. He felt no remorse. There was only satisfaction, and the wish that he could have made his brother suffer more. Tanka had suffered a lifetime, to his brother’s profit. Oy’he had only suffered a day perhaps, lying broken at the foot of this cliff, before Tanka came to put him out of his misery.
“Mother… Father…” Tanka panted. “Look at your… favored son now!” He rose with a laugh, then bent to catch hold of the dead man’s ankles.
Bloody sweat dripping from his body, Tanka dragged the corpse down the rocky scree to the shadows of the pines. He dropped the man’s legs and stepped back into the sunshine.
“I know you are there!” he called out to the forest.
He waited for a moment, but the forest was silent. His words echoed back to him unanswered.
“I bring you an offering!” he cried out even louder.
He waited for a long time, but the trees did not stir. The forest was as silent as the deepest cavern.
Tanka tired of waiting and waved his hand in disdain. He turned and started walking up the slope to th
e cliff.
His flesh prickled. He heard the rustling of leaves, the creaking of tree branches.
Tanka whirled around. His eyes went wide. He stumbled back in surprise and horror, then tripped and fell to his rump.
“Great Spirit!” he whispered.
The trees had come alive.
Their trunks twisted and bent as they arched forward to take up his brother’s corpse. Vines and supple green branches encircled Oy’he’s lifeless limbs. The trees straightened with a great whoosh, and Oy’he was carried into the treetops, where he hung, dripping, from the quivering branches.
Tanka scurried back, squeezing his eyes shut in disbelief, then opening them again.
The trees passed the body of Oy’he from one to the next until they were satisfied with his arrangement, and then he was encircled again, the vines and branches constricting mercilessly around his limbs, snapping the bones inside.
Tanka rose to his feet, and followed the progress of his brother’s corpse, his eyes full of fear and wonder. He watched as the branches of the trees sought out the soft places of Oy’he’s corpse, then drove into his flesh, piercing him through. Living vines snaked across his torso, slithering into gullet and ass, and then Oy’he’s body was lifted, his arms outspread, and the movement of the trees fell still.
All this Tanka watched, transfixed, and then he turned and stumbled back to the old man’s cave.
4
On the way back, he spotted a large toad. It was the first living creature he had come across in the forest, save for some grubs and a few odd insects.
The toad was fat, bigger than Tanka’s fist. He began to salivate the moment he saw it, thinking he would catch it and roast it over Traweek’s fire tonight.
The toad shifted around on his perch, a mossy log, yellow throat puffing out as it eyed him suspiciously.
Tanka took a cautious step toward it, bringing his hands up to snatch the animal from its roost.
Behind him: the snap and rustle of twisting tree branches.
Tanka watched as the knobby branch of a nearby birch whipped down and speared the toad. Tanka’s supper gave out one sputtering croak, and then it was whisked away, born into the treetops to be devoured.
5
The old man sat in the dirt at the entrance of his cave, one gnarled hand curled around the shaft of his walking stick. He did not look up when Tanka stumbled, covered in his brother’s drying blood, into the clearing nearby. Only his thin white hair stirred, and that only by the wind.
Tanka wheezed, resting for a moment with his hands on his knees, then stood upright and approached the old man.
“Given yourself to the forest, have you?” the old man inquired.
“To the spirit that lives in the treetops,” Tanka boasted.
The old man laughed. “There is no spirit dwelling in the trees, fool! It is the forest itself which lives!”
“How?” Tanka asked.
The old man shrugged. “How would I know? I am no wiser for my years. Old age has only made me mad.” He peeked up through his dangling eyebrows then, grinning slyly at Tanka.
“You know!” Tanka accused.
“I suspect…” the old man replied.
“What?”
Traweek sighed.
“My people, the Onemara… We practiced sky burial for untold generations,” the old man confessed. “Then the forest became greedy. It began to take my tribesmen while they still lived. Snatched them from their tents at night. Snared them while they hunted.”
“Yet, you were spared,” Tanka said.
“I gave myself to it, just as you did.”
The old man scrawled in the dirt with the tip of his walking stick.
“I was… impressed by its magic,” he continued. “But I was also a coward. I did not wish to be devoured.”
“It is like a god,” Tanka sighed, smiling up at the treetops. He traipsed behind the old man and leaned against the rock face. “An earth divinity, perhaps, tempted by the offerings your people made to it when you buried your dead in the sky.” He picked a few pebbles from a seam in the granite, hefted a stone and weighed it in his palm.
“There is nothing divine about it,” Traweek sniffed. “It is a vile and greedy thing. It lives only to feed. It derives great satisfaction in the torment and suffering of all fleshy creatures, which it abhors with all its soul. Know this, Tanka… your service to it will drive you mad, just as it has driven me mad. I am happy to be finished with it.”
Tanka had stepped quietly toward the old man, bouncing the stone in his palm.
“Finished?” Tanka echoed.
“Yes! Did I not say I’d dreamt you?” the old man snarled. His bony frame was trembling. “I knew when I saw you that my fate was sealed. I only ask that you burn my body when it is done. Do not let the Kho’Bouldh have my flesh, not until my spirit has fled it!”
Tanka froze.
“That is its name?” Tanka whispered.
“That is what we called it. Now do it! Use all your strength! I do not wish to suffer!”
Tanka raised the stone over his head.
The muscles in his back and shoulders quaked.
“Kho’Bouldh!” he cried out suddenly. “I bring you another soul!”
“No!” the old man wailed, struggling to rise.
Tanka struck him in the crown.
The old man fell to his side and tried to crawl away, blood seeping from the gash in his head, but Tanka dropped onto the old man’s back with his knees and struck him again… and then again.
“Kho’Bouldh!” Tanka howled, blood dripping from his hands.
The forest answered.
Kobold
“How does it feel?” she asked.
"What?"
"To be the one who conquered Hell House."
"I didn't conquer it," he said. "It took all of us."
--Richard Matheson, Hell House
Awake In the Dark
1
“’Kobold’,” Tish read aloud. She turned to Jane and asked, “What do you think that means?”
After finishing their active investigation, the Ghost Scouts team had taken a break from filming before bedding down for the remainder of the night. Most of the gang was in the parlor, reviewing the evidence they’d caught on camera earlier. Jane, Tish and Little Dan, however, had decided to retire to the library. Of all the rooms in the sprawling house, the library was the least menacing. It was the only room that felt safe enough to let their guard down… that ‘safety’, of course, being a relative distinction.
Jane was sitting at the reading table, a hardbound print of A Wanderer in the Spirit Lands open in front of her. She had taken several tomes from the shelves—rare occult texts by authors like Jacob Boehme, Balthasar Gracian and Hiram Butler—with hands that trembled in excitement.
The table was hand-carved and glossy with varnish, a one-of-a-kind objet d'art, with satyrs and dancing maids frolicking around the skirt. It would probably sell for a small fortune if Robert Forester decided to auction the antique.
The copyright page of Franchesso’s Wanderer was dated 1912. The book was massive, with thick vellum pages, but the spine felt decidedly fragile so Jane was turning the pages with extreme care.
She glanced over her shoulder when Tish called out to her, asked, “’Kobold’?”
“It’s written right here,” Tish said, pointing to a marble placard centered in the brick mantle of the fireplace. The words KOBOLD were carved into the milky stone block. The lettering was V-incised, and the marble block boasted an intricate frame of twisting ivy and curled leaves, carved in relief.
“A brand name?” Little Dan suggested. He was sprawled on a sofa, trying not to doze.
“I doubt that’s a brand name carved into that fireplace’s mantle. It looks like it was built by hand,” Jane replied. “It’s probably a family name. A relative of the Foresters maybe, someone who married into the family?”
“There are strange little statues on the mantle, too,”
Tish said, pointing with one red lacquered nail. “Come look.” She had curled her nose in distaste.
Jane scraped her chair back and rose. She crossed the library and squinted at the metal figurines Tish had discovered.
“What are they made of?” Jane asked. “Looks like brass or copper.” The metal effigies bore a thick green patina from decades of oxidation.
Tish shrugged.
There were half a dozen human-shaped figures on the mantle, their naked forms crowned with animal heads: goat, pig, bull, bird. Jane lifted one of them, a fat figure with a porcine head and a disproportionately large, jutting penis. She turned it over in her hands, her eyes narrowing behind the thick lenses of her coke bottle glasses, but there was no inscription under the base. Not even a date.
“Could be some type of fertility idols,” Jane suggested, placing the pigheaded figure back on the mantle. She shifted it until it was back in the clean circle it had stood in for so many years. “The previous owners were into a lot of occult-type stuff. Those books I’ve been looking at are esoteric texts from the turn of the century. Priceless, really.” She frowned then, thinking. “Wait a minute… kobold?”
Tish arched her eyebrows as Jane crossed to the shelves on the far side of the room. She watched as Jane perused the gilded spines, then selected a hefty volume and carried it to the table. Jane closed A Wandering and pushed it aside. She set the new book in its place and opened it. Flipping through its stiff pages carefully, she suddenly put finger to print and exclaimed, “Here!”
“What is it?” Tish asked.
Little Dan had roused, was looking interested now, too.
“Kobold!” Jane said. “It’s not a brand or a family name. It’s a type of supernatural creature, a sort of house deity, like a gremlin or a… uh, brownie.”
Tish turned the naked figurines toward the wall and joined Jane at the table. Little Dan had gotten up and was looking at the book over Jane’s shoulder. There was a woodcut illustration on the page she had turned to, a picture of a woman in dress and scarf doing dishes as a small black creature perched on the counter beside her-- a child-like figure, but with tail and horns.